This paper identifies an externality of a firm's unionization that affects the capital structure decisions of other, non-unionized firms within a local labor market. We find that union victory in a firm leads non-unionized firms to increase their market leverage ratio by 0.9 to 1.3 percentage...

This paper develops a new framework for the design of collateral requirements in a centrally cleared market. Clearing members post collateral - initial margins and default funds - to increase their pledgeable income, thereby credibly committing to risk management. We show that initial margins...

Firms reduce investment when facing downward wage rigidity (DWR), the inability or unwillingness to adjust wages downward. I construct DWR measures and exploit staggered state-level changes in minimum wage laws as an exogenous variation in DWR to document this fact. Following a one standard...

Insider trading conveys insiders' private information to outsiders. This private information potentially benefits rival firms, which may reduce the competitive advantage of the insiders' firms. Using multiple approaches to identify proprietary information risk, we find proprietary costs are...

We show that labor search frictions are an important determinant of the cross-section of equity returns. Empirically, we find that firms with low loadings on labor market tightness outperform firms with high loadings by 6% annually. We propose a partial equilibrium labor market model in which...